Bending Behavior

What do two-headed worms, laboratory experiments on babies,
miniature mazes, thinking machines, "coercive stimuli,"
remote-controlled cats and military-sponsored anthropologists have
in common? Each, according to Rebecca Lemov, was a key instance in
the service of a 20th-century idea:

If one could quantify and control the internal arena of the
personal self—its urges and wants, its worries and
fears—then the running of a modern society would require less
brute external force. In the long term, putting this idea into
practice would make it possible to regulate human beings in tune
with the needs, demands, desires, and models of the social order, so
that people would want to do whatever they were instructed to do
(for example, to die for one cause, shop for another . . .).

Lemov, an anthropologist by training, delves into the history of
this idea, from its origins in the agricultural hybrids of Luther
Burbank at the turn of the century to its expression in behaviorist
psychology in the first three decades of the 20th century and
eventually to the most disturbing and science fiction-like
scenarios, of which Stanley Milgram's 1961 "obedience to
authority" experiments, wherein the social scientist easily
convinced laboratory subjects to administer electrical shocks to
total strangers, are only the best known.

As she details in her often fascinating book, World as
Laboratory, scientists began their quest to remake life by
probing plants and lower-order animals such as sea urchins. They
moved on to the white rat—the first creature bred for the
laboratory—and then tentatively but restlessly transferred
their gaze (and their instruments) to human beings as the century
marched on.

Taking a breezy biographical approach, the book follows the
connections among teachers and students, collaborators and
colleagues to trace the strange career of social engineering.
Lemov's narrative is lively and packed with characters who were
visionaries or eccentrics, depending on one's point of view.

In contrast to much of the existing literature on the history of the
social and behavioral sciences, Lemov tracks not a scientific
discipline or community but an ambition, ages old but seemingly
newly within the realm of possibility: to refashion human beings
from the outside in. She persuasively documents how principles
derived from Jacques Loeb's study in the early 20th century of plant
tropisms—for example, the tendency of leaves to orient
themselves toward the sun—led in fits and starts to a
full-blown technology of human behavioral engineering. This was a
science premised on the notion that behavior could similarly be
shaped, not by sunlight but by an experimental scientist who
controlled and moderated the surrounding environment. Such efforts
found fruition, among other places, in the bizarre brainwashing and
hypnosis programs of the CIA during the Cold War and in Timothy
Leary's mind-opening experiments with LSD at Harvard.

Behaviorism—the faith that actions (rather than thoughts,
impulses, unconscious urgings or the like) are the raw material of
psychological science—provides the common, albeit loose,
thread. John B. Watson, Loeb's famous student, made this faith plain
in his claim that adult humans could be manufactured from scratch
through the proper "conditioning" of fear, love and anger
in babies. A generation of like-minded psychologists, psychiatrists,
anthropologists and sociologists gathered around experimental
psychologist Clark Hull at Yale's Institute for Human Relations in
the 1930s. Funded by Rockefeller monies, they put theories of
"behavioral feedback" and "aversive
conditioning" to work in realms as diverse as race relations in
the Deep South and "human relations" on the factory floor.
They even, according to Lemov, invited a certain version of
Freudianism into their fold, transforming it in the process.

World War II propelled behaviorists, especially those working at the
intersection of culture and personality, into national bureaucracies
and far-flung corners of the world. Ever more sophisticated in their
descriptions of the mechanism regulating the organism's relation to
the environment, researchers remained riveted on an overwhelmingly
simple premise: that a stimulus, properly administered, provokes a
predictable response.

Ample funding and willing researchers were available, but for
behaviorism to gain traction, suitable showcases for its enactment
were also required. Laboratories, Lemov asserts, were the sites
where theory and practice came together in startling ways. These
were the places—often hidden from public view—where
study participants were subjected to restraining devices, problem
boxes, galvanic skin-response recorders and "punishment
grills" designed to simulate the real world, and where
scientists acted out their dreams of revising humanity.

But this was just the first act of a larger drama, according to
Lemov. As she sees it, once behaviorist ideas had been invented and
polished in sterile laboratories, they were then unloosed in the
world, finding their way into government-sponsored counterinsurgency
plots and drug-induced behavior modification, and ultimately into
advertising campaigns, public relations strategies and "the
kind of reality people now inhabit." Writes Lemov, "Every
department store, every classroom, every enclosed social situation,
every personal encounter has become a potential laboratory."

The weakest link in World as Laboratory is this blurry
final step: the notion that mid-century behaviorism left the realm
of experiment in the 1960s to fundamentally reshape contemporary
life in the image of the claustrophobic control chamber. There may
be a grain of truth here. But do market research, personality tests
and focus groups really exert the same kind of power over us that
the white-coated Milgram exercised over his laboratory subjects?
Wouldn't the behaviorists be just a bit disappointed by the
feebleness (and imprecision) of what they are claimed to have wrought?

Lemov is at her best in undermining the analogies that psychologists
and other social scientists made between artificial mazes designed
for rats and the complex labyrinth of human social life, between the
effects of disorienting contraptions on pigeons and the effects of
stress on individuals, between laboratories and real life. She is
less successful at pinpointing the social forces—rather than
the individual biographical quirks—that made such
substitutions imaginable, and she is less successful still at
examining contemporary challenges or alternatives (scientific and
otherwise) to such reductions of human existence. At times, lapsing
into the passive voice, Lemov suggests that the juggernaut of social
engineering had neither authors nor critics nor even resisting
subjects: "The goal was the reconfiguration of human behavior
and eventually all human capabilities, so that
man-within-the-environment was no longer a fact simply to be
accepted but an assemblage to be changed"; and,
"Eventually the more generous impulses of social science . . .
were largely transformed into their opposite: to winnow down, to
prevent, and to build systems of control, adjustment, and
persuasion, escape from which would be ever more unlikely."

In the end, the story Lemov tells is a bit too conspiratorial, and
her vision of human engineering too unidimensional, to be fully
convincing. What is more intriguing about her history is that so
many scientists arrived at behavioral schemes via divergent routes
and were emboldened by different agendas (including, she often seems
to argue, their own distressed psyches). Equally striking is how
very often their plans failed, despite their grandiose fantasies of
control and mastery. Not only were the brave new worlds of Watson,
Hull and Milgram disavowed by their social-scientist heirs, but
there is little evidence that, even at the height of modernist
confidence in social science, human engineering scored any lasting
successes (apart from acquiring major monetary grants and
popularizing the hypothesis that when people experience frustration
from one source, they lash out in aggression elsewhere). It is
certainly suggestive of an intellectual sea change that in the wake
of World War II a 41-person team of anthropologists, ethnographers,
sociologists and human geographers was employed by the U.S. Navy to
test out theories of culture and personality and to advise the
admirals on the civil occupation of Micronesia. But it is just as
revealing that the researchers seemed to have little long-term
effect, apart from producing a handful of scholarly articles. Lemov
notes: "What Admiral Nimitz or the navy . . . made of these
investigations is not recorded in detail."

As critical as she is of the godlike stance of human engineers
toward their subjects, Lemov in these instances seems almost taken
in by them, giving more weight to their posturing (their
"unnameable but certain potency") than to their impact. In
fact, again and again she shows that behaviorist aspirations
outstripped the evidence for them. Watson's attempt to build better
babies revealed mostly the driving force of a hope rather than its
realization, as did Canadian psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron's aim of
reprogramming individuals by wiping their memories clean. Indeed,
reading World as Laboratory, one begins to see that even if
the threat of Communist brainwashing had never existed, it would
have been conjured up by U.S. social scientists, who by the 1950s
had been schooled for decades about the malleability of minds in the
face of their own techniques of manipulation.

What Lemov's provocative book alerts us to above all is the
persistence and potential repercussions of an idea, especially when
that idea accrues grants, research centers and intellectual
authority. Writing of a time when social scientists were called to
embrace the "real," Lemov makes an elegant case that they
instead fell under the enduring sway of a particular intellectual
fiction—that human beings might be fully controlled, given the
right set of stimuli and the proper application of behaviorist tools.